David Poland has started doing a video blog for iKlipz. It's called "Lunch With David Poland", and this week, he's so upset about the senseless commotion caused by Tom Cruise's "firing" that he spitz out his entire rant before the menu arrives, without taking a breath. Best moment: "I've lost all perspective on why the journalistic world is so completely willing to become whores!"



Yeah, I'd watch that every week. Onto the blogroll it goes (making David's media empire probably a bit unfairly overly represented over there. If you think I should be linking to you and I'm not, let me know.

via Screengrab

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Going into the weekend, 8/25...

Go see Joe Swanberg's LOL at the Pioneer Theater in New York. It's both smart and innovative, without being obnoxious about either acheivement. In March, I wrote this review.

My review of Idlewild is up on Netscape. In short: *shrug*. Anyone who claims it's either a disaster or a success is probably giving it too much credit.

But did you hear about what happened at the all-media screening? The fist fight that broke out in the middle of the climactic gunfight? The total panic that ensued, the stompede down the aisles, the shouts of "I think he has a gun" that made it absolutely impossible to concentrate on the rest of the film? Look, I know this wasn't Rules of the Game or anything, but, you know -- I try to give every film I review a modicum of respect. But when shit like this happens (and this is just an extreme version of the kind of shit that DOES seem to happen at a lot of all-medias, where "regular" people are used to fill the seats not occupied by lower-tier press like myself), it's hard to hold onto the hope that publicists extend the same level of respect to the people reviewing their products.

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Snakes on a clusterfuck...

"One question lingers, for me at least. When "fans" respond to an unabashedly silly title like Snakes on a Plane and start riffing on it, how seriously do they mean for their suggestions to be taken? For some reason, the whole thing makes me think of what sometimes happens in high schools, when popular bullies whisper not-very-nice suggestions into the eager ears of class dorks. I wouldn't want to insinuate that this is what's happened here, of course, but the possibilities are exciting. What could we get Tom Cruise to say? Send suggestions to his people via MySpace." --from Carina Chocano's LA Times review.

So the internet nerds have become the jocks, and the studio execs have become the nerds? I guess that makes sense -- after all, the nerds always get rich in the end.

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Hiring at Netscape...

We have a handful of positions open, on both the editorial and development ends. C.K. breaks them down here. On the editorial side, we're looking for an extremely web-savvy writer with video skills -- basically, someone who's both vlogging and blogging would be perfect. That person would eventually be working pretty closely with me, as I'm coordinating a lot of our event coverage and our experiments in original content, so if you're interested, send me an email: karina[at]newnetscape[dot]com.

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Idlewild ...

Early word* on the Outkast musical is floating in, and it's ... um ... mixed.

Nick Schrager writes for Slant:
"Factor in across-the-board bland performances, heaps of empty hustle and bustle, and one off-kilter ballad from [Andre 3000] to a corpse, and the result is a middling musical mishmash that can't keep a beat."

Meanwhile, whilst Variety's John Anderson admits that Andre and Big Boi's musical numbers (most of which are done by one exclusive of the other, as the two halves of Outkast apparently can't stand to work together) can be "incongruous", the project as a whole "achieves magic--something sorely missing from so many movies these days--and does so via a philosophy of respect, but not reverence, for what's come before it; it never recycles, it just reimagines."

Huh. I'm seeing it on Wednesday, to review it on Netscape for Friday.

*That is, if word on a film that has been delayed for two years, which has not yet been widely screened, and which opens in less than a week, can be considered "early" at all...

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Roge in recovery...

I just returned from vacation to see that Mr. Ebert has posted a new message on his website from the hospital room he's been confined to for the past two months. He's apparently writing and watching movies, in between physical and vocal therapy. "I don't have a crystal ball," he writes, "So I can't tell you when, but I sure look forward to being back on the movie beat." Ebert has been a tireless supporter of online film writing for years, and he's also gone out of his way to stoke my own professional ego on more than one occasion. I know I'm not the only one who hopes to see him back in action soon.

Incidentally, Leonard Lopate (who I find generally intolerable, to the point where I've been toying with the idea of starting a blog called LoHate for a while) had his brother Phillip on the other day to talk about his latest book, an anthology of American film criticism. They got in a bit of a funny debate about Roger, with Leonard knee-jerk dismissing Ebert as a TV critic, and Phillip staunchly defending his place in the canon. Listen here.

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This is my invite to the Snakes on a Plane premiere. It arrived via DHL, courtesy of the New Line Interactive Publicity Department, earlier this week.

I am not going to use it.

I don't know, maybe I'm crazy. From talking to friends about this over the past week, I'm starting to think I might be. But ultimately, my decision not to go stems from a combination of corporate policy, and my own good old fashioned distrust of the Hollywood publicity machine. Let me go back to the beginning. Last summer and fall, when I was running Cinematical, we wrote a few stories about this wacky film that we heard was in production. It had a stupid title. It was funny. Early stills were released -- evidence that the stupid title was, however improbably, meant literally. We had a caption contest, which brought in more comments than any other post to that date (at the time, Cinematical was five months old, and was doing about 20,000 page views a day; a year later, its audience is about 5 times that size). Before long, we realized that we were just one of many blogs making fun of the thing.

Thinking back to those heady days, Snakes felt like any other story. We were just going to mock it incessantly, until we got bored, because that was our lifeblood. Hollywood makes inexplicably silly decisions, and film bloggers mock them for it. That's just what we do. There was no pow-wow where a hundred of us got together and decided, based on a single Sam Jackson interview and a handful of lame stills, to turn Snakes on a Plane into the internet joke of the year.

The studios (and especially mid-level mini majors like New Line) make a lot of films that, in terms of comparative budgets, casts, and over all concepts, look a lot like old fashioned b-picture guilty pleasures. Why did this one blow up? I guess we could point to a number of elements, but I don't think that there's any doubt that New Line's decision to embrace the internet buzz played a key role. New Line has not always been the most blog friendly studio; I remember struggling with their publicity department just to get into an all media for Wedding Crashers. They now have an internet marketing division, which first came out in full force earlier this year during the promotion of Take the Lead. On the one hand, New Line were rightly commended for reaching out to teens by inviting them to create online mashups of footage and music from the film; on the other hand, eyebrows were definitely raised when their publicists started sending out invites to a "blogger junket" -- an all-expense paid trip to Los Angeles, where attendees were shown the film and given "face time" with the stars. The form letter invite that I got explained that Cinematical "stood out of the pack as one that was particularly well done - connected, well written and into the latest trends...[we] can see that you are an influencer among your peers."

A lot of people have looked at New Line's recent efforts to reach out to the blogging community as a good thing -- finally, a studio is taking their audience seriously! I agree with that, to an extent. But it's also clear that this kind of offer would never be made to the New York Times -- and even if it was, one can't imagine Manohla Dargis taking them up on it. I guess if you're blogging for yourself, this just sounded like a cool offer. But Cinematical has always been a for-profit endeavor (that is, its content is not produced impulsively or spontaneously -- its writers are paid for their services), and, for the past nine months, it has been aligned with a major media conglomerate. The blog lives in a grey area between social journalism (ie: amateur) and "real" journalism (ie: professional/mainstream). And the company that birthed the blog, Weblogs, Inc, has a strict ethics policy: No pay-for-play. An all-expense-paid trip to LA at the invitation of a publicity department violates that rule, so we declined the offer.

Fast forward to July. I went to ComicCon last month to produce coverage for Netscape. Cinematical did not send anyone this year, so I agreed to do some coverage for them. We sent a member of our team to a SoaP roundtable, and I took some pictures of their booth. A week or so later, as a "thank you" for our coverage, New Line invited me to the SoaP premiere. I initially agreed, because a) they weren't going to pay for my travel, and b) they're not press screening the thing, so I figured I could go, see the film, and hustle a review up by morning.

Then, about a week after I RSVPed, New Line sent me an email offering to give me a free Treo -- so I could "blog from the red carpet". I checked with my bosses before declining the offer, although I really didn't have to -- I knew accepting a $500 phone from a publicist would be an egregious violation of any ethics policy. More details started to filter in about the premiere -- they wanted us to speak on camera for the DVD extras, but they weren't willing to give us an on-camera credit; the publicists were planning to escort the bloggers en masse down the red carpet, ostensibly to manage our communication with the "actual" journalists covering the event. I then heard an (unsubstantiated) rumor that New Line was actually paying airfare and hotel for at least one of the bloggers who would be attending. Basically, it became clear that if I accepted the invitation, I would in no way be able to legitimately cover the event -- not only would I become implicit in the promotion of the film, I was likely to become part of the mainstream media's story about the premiere. After talking to my boss and my team about it, I decided to back out.

This probably sounds incredibly sanctimonious, but I don't really mean for it to be. The world of blogging encompasses a lot of different people with a lot of different intentions, and as I said above, if you're blogging for leisure, outside of the confines of a corporate or professional institution, of course something like this would sound like a super-cool opportunity, and accepting it would have no professional repercussions. But if they're targeting mostly "fan" blogs with this kind of promotion, I almost feel like that's ickier than targeting pros. All journalists get pitch letters and invitations to junkets; good journalists ignore both. If most blogs are operating outside of conventions that would lead them to automatically decline such invitations, that opens the door for publicity companies to, at best, buy off a handful of consumers, and at worst, buy off a handful of extremely influential consumers who basically function as critics/journalists in the eyes of their readers.

I don't know. I'm actually flying to Los Angeles today for personal reasons, so I'm thinking about this probably a little more than I should be. And though my general instinct says that what New Line's strategy is misguided, I still have a lot of respect for their attempts to bypass the (usually hostile) traditional press and speak directly to their consumers. It's just that, for better or for worse, I consider myself more a member of the press than a consumer.

What do you think?

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Test

Here it is. My new personal blog.

It won't be all that personal.

I'm still working on the formatting around here, so expect a blogroll and stuff soon.

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